Resilience and Vulnerability in Long-Term NGO Clients
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Resilience and Vulnerability in Long-Term NGO Clients Findings from an RDRS Bangladesh panel survey Aldo Benini Nirmala Rani Das Jasim Uddin Ferdous Md. Abdul Hakim N.A.M. Julfiker Ali Hanif Md. Jahadul Islam Md. Eyasin Ali Sarker Md. Rahamat Ullah Faruque Ahammed RDRS Bangladesh February 2008 Frontpage photo: Infant child of a poor brick-gleaning woman in Rangpur, November 2007, the symbol of both growth and vulnerability © Aldo A. Benini and RDRS Bangladesh 2008 Suggested citation: Benini, Aldo, Jasim Uddin Ferdous, et al. (2008). “Resilience and Vulnerability in Long- Term NGO Clients. Findings from an RDRS Bangladesh panel survey” [Version February 2008]. Rangpur, RDRS Bangladesh and North Bengal Institute. In association with LWF/World Service, Geneva House 43, Road 10, Sector 6, Uttara Dhaka-1230, Bangladesh Telephone +880 2 8954384-86 Fax +880 2 8954391 E-mail: [email protected] , Website: http://www.rdrsbangla.net Published by North Bengal Institute for Alternative Research and Advocacy RDRS Bangladesh, Jail Road, Radhaballav Rangpur, Bangladesh Contents Summary...................................................................................................................................4 RDRS in a Nutshell................................................................................................................19 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................19 The Research Team ...............................................................................................................19 Abbreviations and Acronyms ...............................................................................................20 Introduction............................................................................................................................24 Objectives................................................................................................................................25 Vulnerability...........................................................................................................................30 Incomes and Poverty..............................................................................................................34 Growth and Poverty ..............................................................................................................40 Movement in and out of Poverty ..........................................................................................43 The Severity of Poverty .........................................................................................................47 Income Composition and Labor Dependency.....................................................................50 Back to Vulnerability.............................................................................................................54 Income Growth and Recent Life Changes...........................................................................61 Income Growth and Social Development ............................................................................62 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................64 Appendices..............................................................................................................................68 Contact details........................................................................................................................84 3 Summary Why this study? Why resilience and vulnerability? Since it was founded in 1972, several hundred thousand, if not millions of poor households in the northwestern region have participated in the programs of RDRS Bangladesh. Their cumulative number is unknown; most went through an intensive phase of participation lasting several years. Thereafter, they have been in no or only intermittent contact with RDRS programs, notably as federation members, micro-credit borrowers, or targets of existential risks with which the health and disaster preparedness projects are concerned. Fatema and Nazma live in Nageswari Sub-district, where RDRS has worked intensively. Two years ago, their father withdrew them from school. The family had fallen on harder times. The father was ostensibly unhappy talking about this difficult decision, but he justified it by the need to let his elder son continue in college and make savings on his daughters’ education. The family exemplifies the tendency in our sample to withdraw children from school after income growth slowed down significantly in 2005-06. In Bangladesh, the government subsidizes girls’ education. But Fatema and Nazma said they had to pay for books and sundry expenses. RDRS has long been part of the struggle for women’s and girls’ rights; reversals in school enrolment apace with stagnating incomes are a tragic manifestation of continued vulnerability. They highlight that the enjoyment of rights has direct or opportunity costs that households under stress will cut – in Fatema and Nazma’s case with lifelong consequences. Vulnerability to poverty risks and the ability to rebound from poverty spells are critical determinants of the life chances of the poor, including those who became RDRS program participants. Knowing more about entry into, and exit from, poverty is desirable both for the historic record of RDRS and in the context of a social protection debate that is animating development policy. With the passage of time, attribution to any specific interventions of the social and economic advancement that this population has enjoyed since first contact with RDRS has become virtually impossible. Yet, an informed estimate of resilience and vulnerability is attempted here. RDRS has conducted, between 2003 and 2007, three waves of data collection on 800 carefully sampled participant households. Measurement of the income mobility, and thus of movements in and out of poverty, allows us to gauge the livelihood dimension of continued resilience and vulnerability, although not its other important dimensions such as health or human rights protection. 4 In addition, RDRS staff conducted intensive life-course interviews with 21 respondents drawn from the upper and lower extremes of the 2002 household income distribution. These histories were diagrammatically mapped and classified by a small number of life-time mobility types, with a view of identifying the most common crises. We offer three case studies based on them, the first as part of this summary, the others in the main body. Figure 1: Map of the RDRS 2003 working area and of the sample sub-districts Sample Upazilas # Dhaka N Domar Bhurungamari TE ES Jaldhaka TA R IV ER # Nageshwari Rangpur A R River T Sample Upazilas U P 2003; 2005; 2007 A Sample Area M H A 50 0 50 Kilometers R B The four sub-districts (upazilas) in the sample were randomly drawn from a list of 27 mainland sub-districts that were part of the so-called “old RDRS working area”, a crescent-shaped poverty belt on the border with India. The non-mainland area (sandbar island communities in the Brahmaputra River) was excluded as not being representative of the socio-economic situation of the larger working area. RDRS customarily divides its working area into a West Zone and an East Zone, with the River Teesta forming the border. The sample was stratified on these two socio-ecological zones so that two upazilas would be from the West, two from the East. The current RDRS working area is larger than the grayed areas; it has been extended further south, with an exclave formed by a project in northeastern Bangladesh. In the remainder of this summary, we enumerate major study findings in a non-technical style. The main body of the report is laced with statistical expositions, tables and diagrams that readers less enamored with statistics may want to skip. We do invite those interested in the conceptual basis of vulnerability to work through the chapter called “Vulnerability”. For reasons related to current policy debates, but also because this panel survey established a rapid fall in the overall poverty rate of the sample population, our analysis is biased more to the vulnerability side than to resilience. The guiding interest is about factors that, despite the speed in poverty reduction, keep pushing a significant fraction of the formerly-poor back into poverty. Our analysis regains some evenhandedness by focusing on income mobility in both directions. 5 In the report conclusions, we resume the non-technical style, summarizing possible implications of vulnerability for NGO policy and reflecting on past and future Impact Surveys. We are aware of the difficulty that this text may present to some of our readers. We have tried to walk a delicate middle line between everyday concepts of poverty and vulnerability and the complex safeguards to their measurement that the technical literature advocates. This report is one in a series of studies through which RDRS attempts to form a clearer notion of the impact that its long presence in Rangpur – Dinajpur and its manifold programs have had on a generally very poor population. Hence the term “Impact Surveys”. This type of monitoring activity was created in order to go beyond activity reporting, and beyond any of the individual projects that make up the diverse RDRS program portfolio. This particular Impact Survey uses a sample of 800 households drawn in 2003 from a 1999 list of almost exactly 20,000 neighborhood groups. These groups of 15 to